Laurie McMahon

I've known Laurie for more than 20 years, our paths crossed in one of those twists of fate! He's as Irish as you can get, even though he's Aussie born but of pure Irish ancestry, his idea of life is that nothing is impossible to achieve, provided you are prepared to go at it with enough force. His failures in the time that I have known him have been attributable to the fact that he has never had enough forces available to muster in regard to manpower or actual time. He is (or was) a person with his sights set permanently too high in the face of what is often massive opposition and quite often inefficiency! The truth is that he almost always cops a job that has been deemed in the too hard category, and while he has at times succeeded, more often he is mired in quicksand, not necessarily (but quite often!) of his own making in the drive to get things done!

At the time I first met him, there had been a company takeover, and we were both soon considered to be loose cannons and a potential embarrassment to the company that we now worked for. The truth is that neither of us could accept the brand of management that our new employers provided, our practical instincts were eventually proved to be correct in many ways! Property takeovers and individual perks and perceived financial gains ordained the entire thinking processes of the executive staff, and so in their infinite wisdom they pigeonholed us both together in a remote part of the system (country areas!) and left us pretty much to our own devices, with only the odd skirmish with management on Laurie's behalf. This suited us both admirably. We got on well and got things done with a minimum of red tape (if any at all) and succeeded in completing several jobs quite successfully without due fuss. But our presence eventually came back to haunt the top brass in a big way, in the form of undeniable success stories – we had a mate in high places, the Chief Engineer of the company! Part of the success story was financial gain to the company that the books could not explain, and in at least one case a very large embarrassment to one of the company financial minions!

The upshot of all this was that I moved on to what appeared to be greener pastures at the time and Laurie, who had almost run out of friends in the company structure before I met him, was eventually presented with an ultimatum – resign his position or accept a post in Siberia! At that time this was well in that direction – Hong Kong, or more correctly the New Territories above Kowloon, up to the Red Chinese border, almost in shouting distance of the actual border. He had not been there long before problems that can only exist in China began to raise their collective dragon like heads, and it was at this point that I had a phone call from Laurie at the very moment when my green pastures had suddenly, through no fault of my own, been taken from under my nose with a 'Come with us to Queensland or take the sack proposal'. I had no intention of moving house at that time, so in less than a week I was a resident of Kowloon for a projected period of a few weeks, but my casual appraisal of the project confirmed that the problems extended far beyond the proposed time frame. The next few days, spent mostly opening up large cases of machinery, only confirmed that much of it was in an incomplete state and constituted nothing more than an extensive disaster area. So it came to pass that my wife arrived in Hong Kong for an extended holiday for the next nine months or so that it took to get the plant operational.

Operating did not prove to be producing, and it took a lot of time and modification before any sort of efficiency was reached, and this taxed our resources and ingenuity to the limit. By this time not only did Laurie have marital problems, but his determination to get things done at all costs had him head on with the local Company management that was superfluous to say the least, being no more than a sop to the small firm that had been taken over and now had no real place in the vompany structure. But we were stuck with the Australian representation, little more than an office boy and an unnecessary drain on our operating budget.

The two Australian brothers who had owned the original company had built it up since World War 2 and both married local Chinese women. Our company, in taking over, had inherited the tangle of relationships and obligations which form the very fabric of most Chinese business. It soon became apparent that starting a new operation was going to be very difficult and obstructions large and small appeared in our path every day as hidden local forces did everything possible to make the new operation as profitable as possible to the old hands.

The head man of the local village reputed to be listed with Interpol (on the wrong side!) was married to a Dutch woman, and the story was that he enjoyed a nice quiet smuggling operation in the area. We were near the sea coast and very close to the Red Chinese border, and while this was of no concern to us, the arrival of a large factory and hundreds of people on their doorstep didn't bode good for any clandestine operations! Added to this, another Chinese Mr Big, had his quiet country two story hideaway here and he woke up one day to find a four story concrete plant outside his very private fence – it was most unfortunate that anyone operating the plant could see right through his house and had a full view of the grounds and large private swimming pool.
This all set the scene for combined obstructive tactics by the Bigs behind the scene! Right from the first attempts to buy up the multitude of local farmer's plots and subsequent construction of buildings the new company had to run the full gamut of the local Govternment regulations, a lot of which were wont to appear magically as another possibility of official extortion arose. Most problems were overcome with a liberal outflow of cash until the time came to upgrade the very crooked entrance road into the new plant to facilitate the traffic that was to follow the start of real production. This road was of course only a series of rice and vegetable paddies that bore no alignment to each other, their boundaries being no more than a bank of earth, the result of probably thousands of years of fighting, family wrangling and marriage ties.

Came the day when a bulldozer and grader were in position to start the construction of the road, and we arrived at the entrance this particular morning to find that overnight a Chinese style restaurant had been built across most of the road using the conventional materials of blue plastic tarpaulins over bamboo poles! Dozens of local villagers were sitting at trestles, chop sticks into noodle bowls checking out the new cuisine! To say that Laurie was surprised when we rounded the last bend and came upon all this, is hardly an adequate description – we had been expecting some form of trouble, but this was too much! We managed to get past the obstruction and on to the factory office and moments later Laurie, in a state of barely delayed explosion, was talking to the Kowloon office to acquaint them of the problem which he quite rightly blamed on them because of their pussy footed handling of the locals through the whole operation to date!

I had problems of my own with machinery still in an unfinished state and production start up eminent. Laurie furiously confronted the local population at the eatery site, where the village head man and a brace of his thug mates had taken up a stand and cowered the bulldozer driver into a terrified 'no move' zombie! After the first confrontation, Laurie ordered the dozer driver to get on with it, starting with the demolition of the new restaurant! It didn't take him long to realise that the driver had no intention of having his well being cut short by the attendant hoods, whereby Laurie leaped up on the dozer, kicked him out of his seat, proceeded to give himself a crash course in dozer operation (the engine was running!) and then began to charge the whole gathering. This immediately proved one of his pet theories that if you gave the Chinese no opportunity to react to a change in plans they went to water (his words) and so the meeting dispersed and turned into a desperate salvage operation as he rampaged back and forth a few times playing hell with the blade of his new toy! He then returned to the plant site to organise a dozer operator that he could trust together with a temporary working party to act as guards, and so the road was pushed through!

But local 'face' had been violated and it came to pass that Head Office had to put on a feast for the villagers, our local big boss, who was a hopeless wimp, had to present a cheque (HK $10,000 as I recall!) to the village bosses to compensate for the loss of their new business venture. The whole thing was purely a Chinese exercise in extracting one last drop of blood money from the project. Needless to say neither Laurie nor myself took up the invitation to attend the festivities! Later Laurie was officially hauled over the coals for his actions, but the road had gone through and production duly commenced.

Some months later when we finally had the production problems sorted out, but not before we had to redesign and rebuild large sections of the plant which proved quite unworkable, I left for home. It wasn't long after, that management, with everything running smoothly, saw fit to relieve Laurie of his position. This was not before we had had considerable labour problems with some of the old company workers infiltrating the new work force and trying to put their little standover tactics and extortion rackets on the new workforce! This type of thing infiltrates the Chinese people in many ways. The Tongs are all powerful and totally ruthless if they consider that they have cause, and while they obviously have their fingers in some big money rackets, there is also a sort of workers union that, while it does nothing for the workers, keeps various people in standover positions where they work themselves into a job where it is common for them to have their own place to sleep most of the day! This same trait applies to the workers who are adept at transforming hidden spots around the plant or store sheds into cosy bedrooms and card playing rooms, and you have to be on your toes checking your workforce at all times! I have even found workers from the factory next door, holed up in our premises, steadfastly refusing to leave as they don't work for us!

This ejection procedure invariably required the use of one of our English speaking employees to act as interpreter and as they were usually aware of the transgressor's presence and happily accepted it, the ejection procedure could take on quite a humorous quality, with me escorting the victim, who in one instance was carrying his rolled up slab of foam that he used as a bed out of our factory door. These things carry no social stigma for the average Chinese worker and it is common practice for them to desert a work gang to which they have been assigned. They will present themselves as a full blown tradesman in answer to a specific trade job position without the slightest knowledge of the requirements. Then on the other hand you will have a labourer attach himself to a gang of electricians or some other trade workers at every opportunity and being gradually given more technical jobs as a matter of course – next thing he will have left the job and applied elsewhere for a trade position! By the same token it's quite possible that most of your so called technical workers are themselves the product of this school! Another trick is for an employee to bring along a mate who joins the workforce somewhere and the first you know of it is when someone approaches you to complain that he hasn't been given his pay cheque! If you don't check this thoroughly you can find that you have another employee, always because of a so called language misunderstanding!

There is also the problem of some workers taking possession of a new tool that has been introduced to the workplace, and elevating his status to that of foreman of the gang. On one occasion in Singapore it suddenly became apparent that there wasn't a single spare oxy-cutting set in the workshop or tool store, and as I was aware that we did have a large number of sets, I was determined to get to the bottom of the problem. Every worker on site was issued with a store card as a matter of course, and it didn't take long to find out that the head storeman had bought in a quantity of new sets in the weeks past! Checking the worker's cards revealed we had 26 sets out on the site, and 20 or more of these were stashed in workers private lockers – in case they needed to use one! A full investigation revealed the storeman had been buying in electric hand tools, large and small, in large quantities and the overall store inventory was staggering. A lot of hand tools had disappeared and it was established that one ex employee spent less than a week on the job and never even claimed his pay, but our check revealed his store card was full of never to be returned tools! All these stories (and many untold!) give you some idea of the problems of working in Asia and getting things done, most schedules just go out the window!

It wasn't long before Laurie and I were together again in Hong Kong, this time as employees of Jaques Engineers of Richmond in Victoria. Laurie had done his original engineering and draughtsman training apprenticed to this firm, and we became the nucleus of Jaques International (HK), with a workshop in a warehouse on the Hong Kong Island at Quarry Bay. Workshops in warehouses were strictly illegal, but that didn't stop Laurie, and we managed to produce quite a bit of heavy machinery from this spot, the biggest being the construction of a new section of a crushing plant in Macau. This was illegally shipped to Macau under a barge load of exported crushed stone to circumvent vustoms procedures and of course exorbitant cash levees!
I could write a book about this job, we may not have made any money on this particular venture, but it did go on record as an example of how an impossible job by local standards, could be successfully carried out despite the application of a large amount of Chinese graft tactics, both in HK and Macau!

After spending a year on this job, I wasn't keen to renew the contract, and left for home, but not all that much later I was back again with the same firm, now established in a factory on land reclaimed from the sea in Tolo Bay in the New Territories. There were new contracts to be filled and a new work force with the exception of two of our old employees.

Laurie and Connie (his second wife) had their infant son by now, but a change of jobs was eminent, and I returned to Australia only to be recruited a little later to Laurie's new employer in Singapore, our old friends of the Chinese Border days, Readymix Australia. The hatchet had been buried between us and them for the moment and we entered into yet another mass of hopelessly inefficient machinery – a turnkey crushing complex by KOBE of Japan. Readymix were really conned into this one by a consortium of local Malaysian and Chinese interests. It took us many hard working months to finally achieve, and exceed, the rated production figures, and at the end of this time, Laurie was unceremoniously and very wrongly sacked, purely through the firms dirty politics, and I returned to Australia. But we did have a certain amount of satisfaction coming to us as, when the two year contract that Readymix held expired not long after, the consortium refused to allow them to take up a further option! So Readymix retired from the scene, licking it's considerable financial wounds.

I lost touch with Laurie at this time, only getting a letter from him at odd times when once more he found himself the innocent victim of company share tactics at Meekatharra Western Australia. He could probably write a book on this one! From there it was a private business venture at Meekatharra, where again he was a victim of a customer insolvency once again engineered by unscrupulous company share dealings. This precipitated the winding up of his own business, and he again found employment opportunities in the Asian region which led to a contract with a Chilean copper mining venture where I once more became involved in a small way working out the details of a feasibility study. Now, for me it appears to be the end of the story.

I sometimes wonder if Laurie will ever run out of the high pressure steam that appears to sustain him as at the end of the Chile job he will have to make a decision on how to best spend the rest of his working years. He has been married to his lovely Cantonese soul mate for many years now and together they have faced many arduous adventures and raised two lovely teenage kids., I sincerely hope that the Fates smile on them in years to come, because as sure as Hell they deserve some more good times!